Some Elements of a Cultural Theory
of Social Change
Dar
o Montero
AbstractThe present paper attempts to lay the foundations
of a cultural approach for the study of social change, in which
change is understood as a result of a conflict of
self-interpretations between different groups or spheres in a
society. This cultural approach seems to be particularly useful
in explaining the emergence of social movements, which always
presuppose a clash of views, say, between the aspirations of the
people and the official doctrine of the state, just to mention the
most typical case. The concepts and methodological principles
offered here owe a great debt to the work of the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor although he never clearly spelled
out a meta-theory on change. The paper will then try to show in
what would consist such a Taylorian theory of social change,
and this we do not only by reconstructing Taylors views on this
issue, but also through a critical examination of range of key
assumptions found both in mainstream social science and, more
specifically, in existing theories of social change.
Index TermsCultural identities, identity crisis,
self-interpretation, social change, social imaginary, social
movements, Charles Taylor
I. INTRODUCTION
Western societies operate on the basis of a concrete set of
self-understandings and social imaginaries which make
possible their democratic practices, market exchanges, as
well as the rest of their social institutions and collective ways
of doing. These common self-interpretations are so to speak
embodied in the structure of these societies. But they can be
then articulated thus becoming political doctrines, as we find
them laid down in the constitution of a country. A particular
political culture, that is, a language and a set of practices
defining personhood and societal order, finds its expression
in the constitutional principles that a nation gives to itself.
But there are also other places to look at. Common
self-understandings appear as well under the form of social
movements of whatever kind. These movements are social
in the sense that all of their members share a common
(political) identity, which in turn makes possible their
constitution into a collective agent. Some of these groups fail
to articulate a coherent political agenda, but a common
understanding must exist (as opposed to mere convergence of
interests) in order for us to speak of social movements at all.
In Western societies, the history of modern political and
Manuscript received November 25, 2011; revised December 31, 2011.
D. Montero is with the University of Jena, Germany. He is a Doctoral
Fellow at the Jena Graduate School Human Behavior in Social and
Economic Change (GSBC), Carl-Zeiss-Strae 3, 07743 Jena, Germany. Tel.
+49 3641 930435, Fax +49 3641 943202, email:
dario.montero@uni-jena.de).
social struggles, say, from the early XIX century onwards
shows the crucial role social movements have played in
challenging the state in a more or less radical way with more
or less revolutionary consequences. They are key agents of
change.
The present article argues for a new theoretical and
methodological approach for the study of social change, one
which understands change as the result of conflicting
common self-interpretations and social imaginaries, such as
those we find historically materialized in the tensions
between citizens aspirations and the official ideology of the
government in power, leading to all sorts of political
movements. My claim is that existing theories of social
change, as we find them in sociology and other social
disciplines, fall short of a satisfactory explanation of change
when it comes to understand the rise and transformation of
collective identities; that in one way or another, the
assumptions on which these theories rely necessarily lead to
reductionist or distorted accounts of what I term here cultural
change. In what follows, I attempt at a critical examination of
some of these assumptions, from which I hope to draw the
basic principles for a more appropriate conceptualization of
change.
II. SOCIAL SCIENCE TODAY: THE SPECTER OF ATOMISM
It is today widely acknowledged within the various social
science disciplines that no social reality can be properly
studied in abstraction from its constitutive
self-interpretations [1]-[2]. This is the conviction behind
what has come to be known as interpretive social science, a
general mental pattern for guiding research, which has been
endorsed by such influential and diverse authors as Jrgen
Habermas, Anthony Giddens, and Michael Walzer, among
others. According to this perspective, changes taking place in
social practices, institutions or identities always imply a
transformation in their constitutive self-interpretations, even
in those cases where these transformations are triggered by
external (non-interpretive) factors such as ecological
catastrophes, wars, demographic changes or the introduction
of a new technology in a given society. These kinds of
external factors can certainly bring about deep structural
changes but its effects will be mediated in every case by
modifications of the self-interpretations operating in those
social structures. The point is that despite this emphasis given
to interpretation and meaning, the way social research is
carried out today exhibits the adherence to an unhealthy
individualistic credo: that of atomism and its correspondent
reliance on methodological individualism. The atomistic
dictum is to be found even in disciplines that concern
themselves with collective phenomena, as is the case with
sociology, political science, and social psychology. Atomism
is without doubt one of the founding assumptions of the
social sciences, a powerful set of ontological views and
methodological prescriptions that still today dominates the
way social inquiry is conducted. Perhaps this is the right
place to start our analysis.
The problem with the mainstream of social inquiry is that
while accounting for beliefs and values, considers them as a
mere subjective events taking place in the minds of
individuals. What considerations lead into this atomistic view?
And, what is wrong with it (if anything)? This influential
methodological principle draws, as Charles Taylor would
argue, on the atomism that came with the development of
modern natural science and which was introduced by Hobbes
into the sciences of man [3]. The whole must be understood
in terms of the parts that compose it, and since societies are
made up of individuals, social structures and conditions
should be accounted for in terms of the properties of these
individuals. At first look the idea of atomism appears as a
most natural and obvious stand point, for isnt the individual
human being the only one who can be said to think and act? It
is precisely from the interaction of individuals so goes the
argument that society emerges with its practices, norms,
traditions, etc. Under this impression, one is tempted to
discard any kind of holistic approach that seeks in a
supra-individual level the key terms for an explanation of
society.
The crucial argument against atomism passes through an
examination of the peculiar nature of what Taylor calls
meaning events. The core of the argument is already found
in Wittgenstein. The point of departure is the consideration
that social practices, norms, traditions and the like require
human beings capable of thought something which the
methodological individualist would instantly agree to. But
what is the nature of these thoughts? In examining language,
Wittgenstein was able to show that any linguistic item (a
word or concept, a sentence or judgment) has a meaning only
in virtue of an already existing language, with which this
particular item is internally connected and against which a
simple word acquires a definite signification. Any instance of
rule-governed human behavior, such as a game, moves in a
domain of validity where the part (an action) is determined
by the place that it occupies within the whole (a language, a
set of rules). Taylor applies this insight to meaningful human
behavior in general. Thoughts exist as it were in the
dimension of meaning and require a background of available
meanings in order to be the thoughts that they are [3]. The
example given by Taylor is the hypothetic case where a
Neolithic man praises his lover of being sophisticated in the
way she behaves. But if its true what we know now of the
Neolithic farmers in upper Syria, such a romantic scene could
have never taken place. The available culture and language in
those ancient times did not possess anything resembling the
idea of sophistication and therefore such a talk makes no
sense within this particular cultural community. Meaning
events are according to Taylor those which can only be
intelligible against a meaning background, a language. And
this is what ultimately rules out methodological
individualism.
As meaning events, human thoughts and actions are
necessarily embedded in a society, which should be seen in
turn as the locus of a given linguistic and cultural community.
There can be no individual action without the context of a
society so understood. And since methodological
individualism ignores the latter (in its attempt to decompose
macro structures into individual acts) it cannot deliver a
satisfactory explanation of social life; it will always provide a
partial or reductionist picture of it.
III. MOVING BEYOND ATOMISM: INTER-SUBJECTIVE
MEANINGS
The previous considerations lead to the idea that society is
an undecomposable unit of meaning. Now, what does it mean
for a social scientist to approach society as a whole, i.e. in a
holistic fashion?
An atomist political scientist might be studying, for
example, the observed correlation between certain
ideological beliefs and certain voting practices within a given
society or subgroup of it. In other words, he is interested in
the relation between some subjective meanings and some
objective institutional practice. We are confronting here a set
of ontological and methodological assumptions that tell us
that beliefs, attitudes, and values will always be those of a
particular individual or subject. What is forever out of
consideration in this view is what Taylor calls
inter-subjective meanings, something like objective
meanings [4].
But if the arguments developed in this paper are right, then
what an atomist calls subjective meanings are not real
meaning events in the sense defined above, precisely because
they are defined in isolation from the socio-cultural context
in which they arise. As soon as we see the impossibility of
this, we are drawn to search for the correspondent
background of meanings as the only way to understand the
action/practice under study. We seek to identify the
historically and geographically bounded set of
inter-subjective meanings a specific culture within which
particular actions acquire a value that otherwise would not
have. Inter-subjective meanings are not only available in the
(articulate) form of the political constitution of a state or
other legal documents, but are operative in all its different
institutions and practices; they are, so to speak, embodied in
the structure of a society. Social movements are just another
concrete example of embodied collective self-understandings.
And it is only from the basis of an abstract or disembodied
conception of meaning that atomism can appear as a
convincing theory. Concrete or embodied meaning has, on
the contrary, always a social and objective dimension. The
meanings and norms implicit in these practices are not just in
the minds of the actors but are out there in the practices
themselves, practices which cannot be conceived as a set of
individual actions, but which are essentially modes of social
relation, of mutual action [4]. Inter-subjective meanings in
this sense are not the same thing as consensus, for the simple
reason that the latter presupposes the former. In order to
agree or disagree on something, both parties need first to
understand what they are discussing about, what is the issue
at stake: they first need to share a web of inter-subjective
understandings, norms, values, and the like.
But now the limits of mainstream social sciences should be
visible. Because of the prevalence of an atomist
methodological dictum known as methodological
individualism, social scientists in the great majority of the
cases cannot offer any satisfactory account of
inter-subjective meanings. Cultural identities so understood
and their processes of transformation over time stay forever
out of reach.
IV. TOWARDS A HOLISTIC CONCEPTION OF SOCIAL CHANGE
The project for holistic conceptualization of social and
cultural change is not based on the conviction that
atomistic-empirical social sciences, as we know them today,
are globally wrong. The problem only begins when this
approach is claimed to explain the whole of society. But there
are certain aspects of it individual and collective identities,
cultural and social transformation processesthat are almost
impossible to be made sense of from the individualistic
perspective.
A useful concept to approach holistically the phenomenon
of change is that of social imaginary, recently used by
Taylor to characterize the ways people imagine their social
existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on
between them and their fellows, the expectations that are
normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images
that underlie these expectations the social imaginary is that
common understanding that makes possible common
practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy [5].
Taylors main thesis is that our modern Western world is the
result of a series of transformations of the social imaginary of
pre-modern Europe and North America. Social change is thus
inextricably linked to a mutation of the social imaginary. Of
course this takes time. Its a long process where new
practices (or modifications of old ones) slowly or
disruptively develop among certain groups of the population,
but it also can mean that these developments in turn lead to
the constitution of new social imaginaries. The three forms of
social self-understandings that characterize modernity (as a
consequence of the transformations of the social imaginary)
are, according to Taylor, the economy, the public sphere, and
the practices of democratic self-rule. We find here a nice
framework for the identification and description of
inter-subjective meanings in order to understand the rise and
transformation of collective identities.
The social imaginary is something boarder and deeper than
a political idea, a social theory, is more than a mere common
understanding. It designates the way (a large group of)
ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, which
allows them to make sense of the practices they posses. The
social imaginary is the key element in a cultural theory of
social change. A new idea or theory can only make its way
into history in that the people (or its active segments) share a
social imaginary that includes ways of realizing the new
theory [5].
Now what changes motivated the rise of the modern social
imaginary? Although the analysis undertaken by Taylor does
not claim to provide a clearly cut causal explanation of it, he
does make clear that his project can neither be classified as
idealist nor as materialist we are here faced rather with a
multi-level theory of change. Thus, in accounting for the rise
of the economy as a crucial feature of our modern world,
Taylor points to at least three underlying types of historical
changes: economic ones (the increasing number of business
classes, merchants, and later manufacturers in Holland and
England); political (the new social order requiring ordered
and disciplined economic life for the masses, in some parts of
Europe and in North-America); and purely spiritual changes
(the rejection of the Catholic idea of higher vocations that led
to the Calvinist sanctification of ordinary life of production
and reproduction). But despite Taylors acknowledgement of
multiple factors operating behind the rise of modernity, he is
not explicit in accounting for the dynamics of social change
in general. How does change start?
V. THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
An important complement to Taylors reflections may be
found in Hartmut Rosas formal theory of social change [6].
Building on Taylor and other authors, he sees change as
occurring between four mutually interdependent levels of
self-interpretation. Michael Walzer had already identified
three possible locations of the significant interpretations of a
society, namely, (1) explicit self-interpretations in the form
of law documents, literature, and theories, (2) institutions and
social practices, and (3) the thoughts and beliefs people have
[7]-[8]. To these three, Rosa adds a fourth locus, namely, (4)
the body-practices, habits, and feelings of individuals. There
is here a relation of interdependence and well as of partial
autonomy between these four levels of meaning, where (1)
and (3) refer to explicit or reflective forms of
self-interpretations, and (2) and (4) go for implicit or
embodied meanings. The main insight behind this theory is
that institutions and theories, or implicit and explicit
self-understandings, can easily get into conflict and mutual
tensions that put pressure for change on one or both of them
[6]. In other words, this formalist theory explains the
dynamics of social change using a criterion of consistency. It
avoids the mistake of advocating for a substantive
mono-causal explanation, as we find in classical theories of
social change, and focuses only in the possible tensions or
discrepancies that arise between any of the different spheres.
Of course, the same relationship holds for the individual level,
(3) and (4), but one should not forget as we showed in the
previous sections that individual self-interpretations are
always embedded in a social context, or as Taylor puts it
elsewhere in a web of interlocution [9].
Following the same intuition, I want to argue that the
causes of change are to be found at the level of a societys
self-interpretations and the degree of discrepancy or
coherence among them in opposition to traditional
approaches which view the causes of change in interests and
inequalities (say, in a neo-Marxist line of thought) or the
introduction of new technologies into a society (as some
exogenous accounts of change would have it). Societal
self-interpretations are more or less coherent systems of
beliefs whose contents cannot be simply deduced from the
structure of the societal system in which they occur and from
the position of the actor within it. (This autonomy and
inherent power of moral ideals is an issue I will try to
elaborate below).
There is a threefold meaning attached to the notion of a
self-interpretation of decisive importance: it is an
interpretation/definition i) about the self/subject concerned,
ii) constitutive of the self (in the sense that it shapes his/her
identity), but more importantly, the interpretation here
involved is one that is iii) provided by the self. In other words,
a cultural explanation of change in our sense is not based on a
third person approach, on exterior factors accounting for
individual/collective change as we find for example in the
resource mobilization theory [10]-[11] or, in a different way,
in the political process model [12] when it comes to
explaining the emergence of social movements. We are
primarily interested in self understandings, expectations, and
values of the people concerned; we are interested in how
people imagine their social life. This is why we think that the
concept of social imaginary introduced in the previous
section plays a decisive role in any explanation of
socio-political change.
Let me briefly introduce the basic insight behind this
approach by reference to the apparition of social movements
in general. To this end, we need first to distinguish between
two kinds of cultural change. In the strong sense, a cultural
change means a radical transformation of the way a society is
conceived as a whole, the emergence of a new horizon of
values, norms and practices. A change of this magnitude can
only occur when the background understanding on which a
society is based suffers a complete modification. This is the
interpretation of Charles Taylor in relation to the emergence
of what he calls the modern identity, a whole new set of
self-understandings at the basis of modern western societies
[9]. The point is here that modernity cannot simply be
explained by the decline of religious, metaphysical,
communitarian beliefs or explicit doctrines; the change
involved here affects rather the main assumptions, the
underlying convictions against which those beliefs make the
sense they have: a pre-modern background understanding
was progressively replaced by a brand new vision on
personhood, society, nature, the good, and time.
But there is a second kind of cultural change, one that
arises from the intrinsic contradictions that characterize
modern societies. In the previously quoted book entitled
Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor argues that modern
society is rooted fundamentally on the ideals and realities of
democratic self-rule and market exchange, but affirms that
the modern culture also permits the creation of a new space
where individuals can come together for debating and
exchanging ideas: the public sphere. Now, it is in this public
sphere I arguewhere social movements can emerge,
movements which are not only constituted independently
from the state but usually define their agendas in opposition
to the latter. This is a clear example of the inherent tension
that characterizes modern societies, which would lead sooner
or later following the logic we are presenting hereto
internal social changes. And this is the kind of change we are
primarily interested in.
If the first kind of change (lets call it foundational) was
defined by the emergence of a new background or repertory
of possibilities, the second type of transformation (an
intrinsic type of change) issues from tensions to be found
within the modern repertoire.1 The public sphere allows for
the formation of independent views, eventually becoming a
collective self-interpretation, a new political aspiration,
grasping the collective imaginary, which in turn may lead to
challenging the political ideology of the government. The
more the perceived distance between citizen aspirations and
official politics, the greater becomes the probability for the
emergence of social movements and social changes.
VI. A NOTE ON METHOD
Before proceeding with the analysis, a brief reflection on
method is in order. It should be clear at this point that the
whole project of a cultural theory of change has a strong
historical bent. To understand a political crisis means first of
all to understand the historical context in which that
phenomenon arose; there can be no apriori answers, as we
find them, for instance, in functionalist accounts of change.
For example, one cannot make sense of the current waves of
social movements in Chile without a detailed study of the
constitutional and political history of this country. Such a
study would reveal that Chile is a country especially prone to
develop crises of legitimacy due to the coexistence of two
markedly different democratic ideals shaping its political
imaginary: one republican (experiencing various phases
since the independence times), the other (neo) liberal [13].
The 2011 student protests in particular are to be understood
as the return of a politics inspired by (a new interpretation of)
republican ideals in reaction to three decades of
market-oriented policies and the privatization of the
education system.2
For this sort of research, a wide range of qualitative tools
seem especially suited. Following Foucaults famous
genealogical style of investigations, a method usually
utilized for historical reconstructions of the kind we just
mentioned is the one generally known as Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA), which aims to show how ideas, discourses
or practices came into being, and how they shape and limit
what people do now. In addition to this, content and thematic
analyses of the political constitution and other legal
documents of a country permit to elucidate the character of
dominant ideologies and doctrines. All these methodological
tools are helpful in uncovering the tensions between
self-interpretation, which are always at the basis of these
crises as we have suggested.
Despite the emphasis given to self-interpretations, that is,
to the particular historical circumstances of a crisis/change in
the words of the people themselves, our approach does not
follow a simple inductive methodology, in the spirit of the so
called grounded theory (at least in a vulgar variant). This is a
crucial difference. The aim is not so much to develop a
theoretical construct of the phenomenon being investigated
1
I recognize that the distinction between foundational and intrinsic
change is problematic, and I still do not have a solution to this problem.
Hartmut Rosa, for example, argues that change in general can be explained
by tensions occurring between any of his four levels of self-interpretation;
in this view, all change is intrinsic change.
2
The author is presently conducting this study case as part of his PhD
thesis.
that is faithful to the actual lived experience of the people
being studied, but rather exploring cases to see whether our
theory helps us understand the object of inquiry. The cultural
researcher is neither interested in testing a particular
prediction stemming from an existing theory (deduction) nor
does he intend to produce a construct out of empirical data
(induction) but tries rather to find the best fit between theory
and data (abduction). In recent years, David Hiles [14] has
developed a useful categorization of these three different
logics of inquiry, calling them respectively theory-driven,
data-driven and explanation-driven, the last one being the networks (among other mobilizing structures), and the
type of inquiry we are interested in.
But it is a phenomenological explanation. What we need
to explain is people living their lives; the terms in which they
cannot avoid living them cannot be removed from the
explanandum, unless we can propose other terms in which
they could live them more clairvoyantly [9]. The best
account principle implicit here reposes ultimately in a
criterion of plausibility; it is a hermeneutical exercise that
bears always the character of a provisional explanation, an
explanation can later be challenged, corrected, improved by a
later interpretation. At any given moment, the best
interpretation possible of a phenomenon is that which
succeeds in making sense of the phenomenon in question to a
degree that alternative accounts do not achieve. In this
interpretive enterprise many different theories could, indeed
should be utilized in order to enhance our understanding of
the reality under study. Theory is always in the service of
understanding reality, and never an end in itself. Usually the
sensible strategy that follows the researcher in sticking to his
third type of inquiry is the selection of a case study, in which
the phenomenon can be intensely studied.
VII. THE DRIVING FORCE OF MORAL IDEALS
In contrast to a range of theories of change from Marx to
Daniel Bell that tend to understand values and ideals as
co-products of socio-economic developments, this cultural
perspective recognizes the inherent power of values and
moral ideals and their historical role in the shaping of our
social world, most famously articulated by Max Weber in his
account of the protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism, a
line of thought that has somehow survive until today, for
example, in the work of the political scientist Samuel
Huntington and the psychological theorist David C.
McClelland. The critique is here directed against reductive
accounts of change which seem to attribute little or no causal
role to moral ideals. Just to pick the aforementioned example:
why is it that the Calvinist idea of sanctification of ordinary
life took grasp of the collective imaginary of the people in
early modern Europe? What is the ides-force that this new into account the crucial role played by ideas and sentiments for explaining
vision of the good life contained? This interpretive question
occupies a central place in a cultural approach to change. As
Taylor rightly observes, all historiography (and social
science as well) relies on a (largely implicit) understanding of
human motivation: how people respond, what they generally
aspire to, the relative importance of given ends and the like.
This is the truth behind Webers celebrated affirmation that
any explanation in sociology has to be adequate as to
meaning. [9].
Now, when we try to explain the rise of social movements
(or any phenomenon involving social change) this
interpretive question alone does not suffice. In these cases,
we also want to know which were the precipitating
conditions for their coming into being. Without discarding
available theories that provide an account of these
movements in terms of structural conditions and
opportunities, I propose to see their emergence as a result of a
clash of socio-political self-understandings. Political
opportunities and resources, the existence of grass-root
apparition of charismatic figures, all these factors do in fact
help to bring these movements about, but they should be seen
as facilitating conditions and not as their causes. From the
cultural perspective, values and ideals, moral and political
self-understandings play a crucial role in shaping the curse of
the events.3
It is not a simplistic idealist position, however. In order for
a moral ideal to have inherent power in transforming reality,
it must be an imagined ideal, not a mere theory. According to
the embodied conception of meaning that we subscribe to
in the tradition of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein,
and Michael Polanyi there is an inextricable connection
between ideas (theories) on the one hand, and practices and
institutions on the other, where the former cannot be
conceived without the latter. In a sense, ideas can be even
seen as secondary to practices, in that they articulate or make
explicit what was always already present in the ways people
act within society, in the existing practices. This dimension
of implicit or inarticulate meaning is what we identified
above as the background understanding of a human
community. The complex relation ideas/practices and its
consequences for the study of social change in general and
political change in particular has been aptly summarized by
Taylor with his distinction of two different (ideal typical)
paths in which this can occur:
On the one hand, a theory may inspire a new kind of
activity with new practices, and in this way form the
imaginary of whatever groups adopt these practices. The first
Puritan churches formed around the idea of a covenant
provide examples of this. A new ecclesial structure flowed
from a theological innovation; this becomes part of the story
of political change, because the civil structures themselves
were influenced in certain American colonies by the ways
churches were governed, as with Conneticut
Congregationalism, where only the converted enjoyed full
citizenship.
3
Within social psychology, there are approaches to social movements,
such as the one by David Snow and various of his colleagues, which do take
collective action, but these focus rather narrowly on conscious strategic
efforts to shape common self-understandings. There are two very important
issue that unfortunately I cannot elaborate further here, but that at least
deserved being named: a) these cognitivistic approaches do not concede
enough importance to the background understandings that people have, the
richer dimension of implicit meaning central to our cultural theory, and b)
they remain committed to a impoverished behavioral ontology that cannot
capture the dialogical conception of the self we adhere here. This social
psychological line of thought can be traced back to G. H. Mead. (For a
detailed discussion on this last point, see: Ch. Taylor, The Dialogical Self, in:
The Interpretive Turn Philosophy, Science, Culture, Eds. D. R. Hiley et al.,
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991)
 Or else the change in the social imaginary comes with a
reinterpretation of a practice that already existed in the old
dispensation. Older forms of legitimacy are colonized, as it
were, with a new understanding of order, and then
transformed, in certain cases, without a clear break. [5].
As we see, in both cases change happens through a
transformation of the social imaginary of the people involved.
And here lays the difference with vulgar idealistic positions.
For all that has been said, the concept of self-interpretation
we are using throughout here should be understood in a
broader and deeper sense: not as mere ideas but as modes
of social relation among agents.
Let us examine briefly an example to get a taste of how
moral ideals and values can mobilize people and modify
social and political conditions. In the 1960s a large cultural
change started taking place in our Western civilization,
particularly in Central Europe and North America. What was
involved in this mutation, whose locus was the young, was
that certain of the fundamental reference points for the
formation of identity in our civilization [began] being
challenged [15]; in particular, 1) the model of maturity,
where the adult man determines out of himself his values and
life goals, as opposed to an external source of authority. This
ideal of a self-defining subject based on individual freedom
played then a central role in American culture, as it still does
today. 2) From the point of view of the self-defining
individual, the surrounding world is consequently seen as a
set of raw materials for his own (productive) purposes, rather
than as a source for forming his own identity; which is in turn
connected with 3) a certain orientation to the future: the past
as that to be constantly surpassed. This is a paradigmatic
example of collective identity crisis, as a crisis in allegiance
to this model among young people, especially among
students, which was followed by a complex and interrelated
host of social movements.
How to account for this identity crisis and the emergence
of the new social movements and their characteristic agenda
for the advocacy of identity politics? At that time, the rising
generations were already in a position to experience some of
the chaotic ecological and social consequences stemming
from the aforementioned model, which gave them a reason to
challenge it. But one could argue as well that the new
generation brought with them a longing for community and a
new sense for creativity and human feeling, against which the
dominant model of maturity appears to certain extent as
inhuman and unsocial; it cut us off from old sources of
identity [15]. Pressing social and ecological problems
(associated to the prevailing social model) as well as a feeling
of dissatisfaction with the dominant culture are just two
reasons among others that help explain an increasing
divergence between the official institutional order and the
new sensibility of the young generations, which pressed for a
variety of changes, in legislation, in the formation of new
political parties, new social networks and communities,
among others.
VIII. CULTURAL PLURALISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE
I would like to make explicit one final implication of the
cultural approach presented here. It was noted that the notion
of self-interpretation conveys the idea of a first-person
description; that the task of the researcher is to understand
social life from the perspective of the social agents
themselves. It was further argued that these
self-interpretations are never the possession of atomistic
individuals but they exist in the form of socially shared
common understandings, which can only be properly
addressed and studied as such with the help of a holistic
approach. Now, behind this ideal of social inquiry there is a
particular conception of culture, one that is closely associated
with the meaning this word has in anthropology. In the
context of the discussion of atomism, culture was generally
identified as a historically and geographically bounded set of
inter-subjective meanings within which particular actions
acquire a value that otherwise would not have. More
specifically, culture can be viewed as a particular language
and a set of practices, including visions of the good life,
society, person, among other defining aspects of any human
community. In this anthropological sense, cultures can be
seen as original and unique world-views or broad value
horizons, which are mutually incommensurable. And it is
precisely this cultural pluralism, the irreducibility of
cultures, what our cultural approach sets itself to capture.
This culturalist stance has huge consequences for the analysis
of modern societies and their inherent conflicts and
transformations.
In the culturalist viewpoint, the difference between
pre-modern (Christian) Europe and modern western
secularized societies is as big as the difference we find among
cultures around the globe, say, between India and the USA.
The pluralist stance is opposed to what Taylor calls
acultural theories of modernity, a dominant line during the
last two hundred years, which see the growth of science,
instrumental rationality, negative freedom, democratic
self-rule as universal and neutral changes that any society
could (and inevitably will) undergo, and not as distinctive
features of a particular culture originating in Europe [16]. But
this distorts. The acultural take on modernity as a universal
phenomenon justifies the imposition of the modern package
of values, institutions and practices on other cultures,
unfitting us to understand the contemporary phenomenon of
multiple modernities. In Taylors view, an acultural theory
locks us into an ethnocentric prison, condemned to project
our own forms onto everyone else and blissfully unaware of
what we are doing [16].
Contrary to this, an appropriate understanding of the
cultural specificity of North-Atlantic societies permits in turn
the clear recognition of the specificity of other cultures and
of the particular trajectories they have followed in
modernizing, for instance, the modernization process that has
taken place among Latin American countries. Here as well
social movements have marked an important part of the curse
of the twentieth century, following the pattern we have tried
to show (discrepant self-understandings leading to
legitimation crises from which these movements arise) that is
at the basis of this kind of phenomenon. However, the only
way of arriving at an explanation of the political struggles in
Latin American countries is by engaging in a concrete
investigation of the political history of this continent, with its
characteristic mixture of Pre-Columbian, Colonial, and
European enlightenment values.
IX. CONCLUSION
I have been discussing some distinctive elements of a
cultural theory of change. It is holistic in that it treats culture
as an indecomposable unit of meaning, as the common
property of all of its (relevant) members. Within these
communities of meaning people can of course disagree, a
diversity of views can arise, but their disagreement is only
possible to the extent that they share in the first place a basic
set of common norms and understandings of what society is,
what are the defining features and attributions of a citizens,
etc. Our cultural approach conceives (intrinsic) change as
endogenously driven by a conflict of self-interpretations
within a particular culture, the analysis of which presupposes
an historical or genealogical investigation for the
clarification of the concrete conditions of the conflict in
question. In this sense, it attaches great importance to moral
and political ideals in their capacity to determine the
modification of socio-political conditions. This recognition
of the inherent power of values must not be confused, as it
was noticed, with a unilateral idealist understanding of
history. In this connection, we maintained that human and
social change is always mediated by a hermeneutical process
taking place in the minds of the people, in that it presupposes
a transformation of the social imaginary of a given
population at a given time. Finally, change must always be
studied as a particular phenomenon in connection with a
particular culture, and never as value-free operations
(instrumental rationalization processes, the move towards
organic forms of cohesion, etc.) as we find them in classical
theories of modernity; this was called the cultural pluralist
stance. Taken together, these features make up a unique
perspective on social change among existing theories in the
field, one that I see especially suited for the study of social
movements and their emergence, a phenomenon we see today
occurring with increasing force everywhere in the world. Far
from intending to provide a detailed theory, the previous
reflections were limited to indicate the direction towards a
more satisfactory investigation of social change in general
and social movements in particular.
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